You did it. After hours of brainstorming, drafting, writing, and editing, your blog is finished. After one final read, you publish it and wait for thousands of users who are hungry for this valuable information to read, share, and comment on it. But after a day or two, no one has read it. A few more days pass, and still not a single reader. What is happening?

Unfortunately, most websites are not as lucky as Ray Kinsella. Building the website doesn’t drive traffic. It takes ongoing effort to build and engage with your target audience. Sure, you can pay for followers on social media or pay for traffic from search engines, but that doesn’t always equal the most valuable user base. Over the next few weeks our team will be writing a few tactics on how to drive traffic to your blog and website. This week, we will look at Email Marketing.

Develop your List

To drive traffic to each of your post, start developing and prioritizing your email list. This is the best way to turn organic, non-branded traffic into an engaged audience that consistently engages with the content that your team is publishing.

Don’t have a call-to-action to subscribe to your email on your blog? There are many tools out there to use that help build an email list such as Listbuilder or Scroll box. Try using these to build your initial list.

Send Your Emails at the Right Time

MailChimp did a fascinating study on the optimal day & time to send out emails. While it didn’t show a clear day that was best, it looks that the best days may be Thursday and Tuesday, not Wednesday. Surprising? We thought so. Their study also showed that between the hours of 8-10AM appeared to be the best. But I suggest reading their full study here. Also, don’t take their research as the 100 percent absolute best plan, base some of your strategy off of your own audiences behavior.

Graphic from MailChimp.

Use Plain Text If You Want More Opens

Hubspot recently found that HTML-enhanced emails decreased their open and clickthrough rates. This may be highlighting a trend towards users staying away from designed email templates as it creates less of a personal, one-on-one experience.

If you are wanting more of your audience to open the emails, try using plain text emails to see if your open rates increase.

Let Your Audience Know That There is a New Post

This may need to go without saying but we will say it anyways. Send an email out when there is a new post. This type of effort will generate a quick bump in traffic. Be sure that your post is optimized for social sharing to encourage this audience to share and bring in more users.

Creating a monthly newsletter with top posts or posts by categories to send to segmented list. This might help drive more traffic to the blog as well as lead to more conversions if you are using a segmented list.

Review the results from the newsletters and send the email out again to those who didn’t open it, but this time try a different subject line or design to see if you can get more users to read the post. That little effort may generate more views and social shares to your website.

Use Marketing Automation

Reviewing your website analytics to identify user flows. Write down which blogs tend to get viewed the most in a single visit. Once you identify a flow, create an automated email campaign with tools like ActiveCampaign or MailChimp sending out those related pieces of content in multiple emails. This will provide your users with the information they are already looking for without requiring them to take much of an effort.

In Summary

Plan out your next campaign with the goal of increasing entrances to your blog from email by a certain percentage. Build your list, send your emails at the right time in plain text, let your audience know when new content is published, and use automation when needed. By following these steps you should start seeing a climb in traffic to your blog. One extra effort that might generate a few more blog entrances, update your email signature with a link to your latest posts.